Chaplin created the Little Tramp — the most universally loved character in cinema history — and used silent comedy to build devastating social satire. The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times attacked industrial capitalism and dehumanisation while making audiences weep with laughter. The Great Dictator (1940), his first sound film, was a direct parody of Hitler. He was expelled from the US during McCarthyism and spent his last decades in Switzerland.

• Nationality: GB
• Roles: filmmaker, actor